Surf City dune, beach rebuilding done until fall

Tuesday

Regulators decline to give extension into sea turtle nesting season due to pebbles in trucked-in sand

PENDER COUNTY -- The rebuilding of Surf City's beach has been stopped ... by some pebbles.

While federal and state regulators didn't have any problems with the sand that Surf City was trucking in to restore the beach strand to its pre-Hurricane Florence width, alarm bells started to sound when the town started using the sand to rebuild its battered berms and dunes.

The post-Florence beach nourishment project was slow off the mark, Surf City Mayor Doug Medlin concedes, “since we had to deal with (the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)) for a long time,” to be reassured that Surf City would be reimbursed for the considerable expense of restoring its beach. “Once we felt like they would pay for it, we voted to do it, but by that time it was … February. We then applied for the (Coastal Areas Management Agency (CAMA)) permit … and then the state inspected and approved the sand that was going to be hauled in; it was approved before it was ever loaded on the truck.”

Approved, Medlin learned to his chagrin, for “beachfront” use. Not for dunes.

“Beach sand is the only regulation that we have,” he complained. “There is no set determination for sand for dune restoration.”

But the trucked-in inland sand had some small stones. Federal regulators found 18 such pebbles in a 15-foot strip they investigated, “and so CAMA put a stop-work order on it,” Medlin said.

Out of 147,000 cubic yards of sand that had been delivered to Surf City, Medlin said, “they had not been able to sift a truckload -- 60 cubic yards -- of stone out of it.

Beach sand is allowed to have 5 percent stone, Medlin said, but a federal official said that since dune sand did not have an allowable level of stone, she would make the determination as to what passes muster. Whereupon she issued her cease-and-desist order, stopping any more of the material from coming onto the beach.

With an annual May 1 moratorium on beach projects in order to protect nesting sea turtles, Surf City ran out of time to complete its beach nourishment project prior to the onset of this year’s tourist season. Medlin said the town was able to complete about 80 percent of the work.

As the Surf City project wound toward a close projected for the end of April, most of the alarms going off about the sand were sounding in the halls of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Medlin said.

“They wouldn’t give us an extension (to continue trucking in sand), even though we had Jean Beasley of the sea turtle hospital here, who cares more about sea turtles than anyone in Washington, saying that she could take care of the turtle situation,” Medlin said.

Beasley, director of the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center, said that while protection of sea turtles is her No. 1 priority, she is a pragmatist. With a strong cadre of volunteers, she said, she had high confidence that the beach project could have been completed after May 1 with no harm to turtles.

To make the situation even more bizarre, Medlin said that if Surf City were getting sand from an offshore dredging operation, the city could get a variance on the law that annually prohibits beach nourishment after May 1. Many North Carolina beach towns regularly gets extensions when their beach nourishment projects run into the May 1 moratorium due to delays, often tied to weather-related issues.

Medlin said he was surprised by the regulators not allowing operations for trucked-in sand to continue past May 1 while often permitting work with dredges, which sometimes injure or kill sea turtles as they suck sand up off the ocean floor, to continue.

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